Changes in Style and Changes in Fashion

Abstract

Any musical community or other style-driven society should have a theory of
how styles emerge, evolve and disappear. The model proposed in this paper differentiates
between changes in fashion and changes in style. The former are driven by insiders
in order to prevent imposers mimicking the insiders style. The latter
are created by outsiders trying to create alternative styles to the mainstream.
This model advocates that new styles, in order to succeed, need to reject one
of the main values of the mainstream style that it is trying to differentiate
from. This rejection impede that the mainstream could adapt the emerging style.

Introduction

We first focus on the development of styles. Specifically, we are interested
in identifying the main factors that shape a particular style.

We understand style as one of the main components of group identity.
A style is the external manifestation of certain underlying values and attitudes.
People decide to follow certain style because they agree with the values and
attitudes it expresses.

Style is not just musical taste, ways of dress or speech. It should
be seen as a combination of all this elements, where the whole is more than
the sum of its parts. In other words, style cannot be easily imitated by an
outsider. An imposer could imitate one part of the style but he will be easily
identified by the insiders. This holistic view of the style imposes special
costs to the newbie who want to assimilate the style. He should spend considerable
amount of time and expose himself to possible retaliation while he tries to
understand the style not as a simple overlapping collection of external attitudes.
Sometimes the style-insiders make some variations to their code. They do this
because they want to force people to spend time in order to stay in the
loop. This assures loyalty from insiders; someone cannot disappear from
the scene for a couple of years and then come back expecting to still be an
insider  he is a newbie.

These changes, fashion changes, do not imply style changes. The
signals change but the underlying values of the style do not. The followers
of the style can follow the fashion without jeopardizing his group identity.

Fashion changes do not explain why a completely new style emerges
and why some people decide to follow it. We borrow ideas from Kuhns paradigm
shift to explain this phenomenon. We argue that there are people who propose
alternative styles; they wish to differentiate themselves from the mainstream
style. The alternative followers will chose a set of underlying values that
are incompatible in some sense with the mainstream culture. This will assure
that the mainstreamers do not follow them.

This paper is structured as follow. First, we explain the fashion
changes from the point of view of signalling theory. Second, we use this theory
to explain the differences between changes in fashion and changes in style.
Third, we make an analogy of this ideas and the paradigm shift theory. Then
we explain the cycle of alternative styles becoming mainstream. Finally we provide
some discussion and conclusions.

Signalling theory, an explanation to fashion

Signalling theory has been used to explain the meaning of signals
in nature. The main point of the theory is that to keep a signal honest it is
necessary to impose a cost on the sender (Bergtrom 2002). This cost assures
that more capable senders will pay a lower cost to emit a signal than less capable
ones. For example, female peacocks prefer males with long and bright tails.
On the other hand, males have to spend much energy to keep their tail big and
shiny, so stronger males can create and maintain these tails more easily than
the weak ones. This will make the males tail a reliable signal of his
strength and health that the female bird can use to choose her mate. This is
known as the handicap principle. This kind of signal is called assessment signals
(Bergstrom 2002).

Sometimes it is impossible to keep the signal costly enough to
assure its honesty (Dawkins 1991). If the society lowers the cost of the signals
to facilitate communication, it is open to deception. The meaning of this signal
depends on social conventions, so they are called conventional signals. This
kind of signal is still meaningful because the members of the community have
some memory of the past performance of the others inhabitants of the environment
(Dawkins 1991). One typical example of this is the reputation of a physician.
A regular person cannot evaluate the quality of a medical doctor. He should
rely on the experience and recommendation of other people to decide the doctor
he wants to visit. This means that the physician must maintain good quality
of service of her patients to have a good reputation and keep having patients.

Another way to keep the conventional signal meaningful is by changing
the signal over time. This kind of signal is called fashion signals (Pesehdorfer
1995). The dynamics behind them is that the cost of emitting these signals decreases
over time, so high quality individuals should keep changing their signals in
order to signal their quality (Pesehdorfer 1995).

Fashion signals are not static signals. These signals convey their
meaning over time. This means that a single snapshot of a signal is not enough
to convey the underlying qualities of the sender. We need to have access to
a set of signals that he displays over time to know his real qualities. The
only way to prove the underlying quality is by displaying the right signal in
the right time. The speed in the change of the signal depends on how easy it
is for outsiders to fake. When the outsiders are able to counterfeit the signal,
it does not serve as group identity signal, then the insiders find a new signal
to express their identity.

For example, the changes in the dress code of particular styles
are fashion signals. The insiders keep changing their wardrobe to distinguish
themselves from the outsiders. Fashion signals are about having access to information.
The easier it is to access the information, the faster this signals change.
In the Internet era, where you can find information about anything from the
screen of a computer, style signals change faster.

One force that drives changes in fashion is countersignaling (Feltovich
2001). Suppose that we can stratify society into three classes: high, middle,
and low. It is difficult to differentiate among them using only assessment signals.
This means that the middle group can easily imitate the high group signals,
so the middle group can be confused with the high group, to the detriment of
the high group. Countersignaling occurs when the high quality group starts to
imitate the attitudes of the low group. This behavior helps to distinguish the
high group form the middle group. If the middle group imitates the low group,
they are not confused with the high group and take the risk of being confused
with lower one (Feltovich 2001). The typical example of countersignaling is
the use of slang. High quality individuals may imitate the speech of the lower
classes. However, if the middle group imitates the speech of the high group,
they will start to sound like the low group. Eventually the use of the slang
will become more popular and the middle group can start using it without being
confused with the lower group. At this point, the high group should find other
ways to distinguish themselves from the middle group. This phenomenon helps
to explain why fashion behaves in cycles (See Feltovich 2001for an explanation).

Recent sociological studies have used signalling theory to explain
many aspects of human interaction, from mating (Gangestad, 2000) and aesthetic
taste (Miller, 2001) in the offline world to Usenet forums (Donath 1998), and
eBay (Kollock, 1999; Resnick, 2001) in the online world.

Evolutions of new styles

New generations want to differentiate themselves form old ones.
They try to find their own group identity that give them cohesion as a generation
and distinguish them from the mainstream. This change is not only in music style
but also in ways of dress and speech. To assure that new style becomes a real
signal of identity, young people should create a set of rules that are incompatible
with the values of the style they are rejecting. This causes the style they
want to differentiate from to play an essential role in the shape of the new
style.
Music has an important role in the development of this new style; it serves
to create and express social cohesion (Noah 1998, Hagen 2002). It brings people
together by signaling a group identity and promoting social interaction. During
these music gatherings, people see how others dress and speak. In other words,
music provides the place where people can be influenced by others. We do not
argue that music leads the development of new styles. On the contrary, music,
dress and speech should be seen as a single unit, but it is the music that disseminates
the new style as a whole.

To shape a successful new style, the new generation should find
one or more important characteristics of the mainstream style and signal something
that is incompatible with these values. This assures that mainstreamers find
new styles unacceptable and incomprehensible. For this reason all the new styles
born as a reaction of the old styles.

As one example, the punk movement was born as a reaction against
the rigidity of British society. Punkers reject the social formalism as a whole,
reject the social structures and become anarchistic, reject the musical virtuosity
of progressive rock and instead play music that is as dirty and unacademic as
possible. Punks find that their attitudes will not be understood and followed
by the mainstream, and thus they adapt them as elements of their own identity.

Similarly, electronic music was born as an antithesis of the traditional
rock band. They reject having four people playing on the stage, and each of
them playing a rigid set of instruments. Electronic music advocates claim the
beginning of a technology-driven era where even traditional musical instruments
are unnecessary. This causes the rejection of rock stars and their fans.

One proof of mainstreams disapproval of new styles is moral
panic. This kind of reaction shows that the set of values and attitudes
of the alternative style is incompatible with some those of the mainstream.
This will reaffirm the alternative groups identity in opposition to the
mainstream identity.

Gaining this rejection of mainstream culture helps the new style
to attract young people who are looking for a group with whom to identity. The
rejection assures that their values are not going to be assimilated by the main
style, making the alternative style a safe paradigm to find their groups
identity.

This process is different from countersignaling. When a new style
is born, a new set of signals is created that differentiates itself from the
mainstream culture. This signal is essentially inaccessible to the mainstream
culture, which makes it meaningful as a separation signal. This includes imitating
attitudes of a lower social group, generating a music style, or approach partying.
While punkers act or actually become homeless they do so to find their
own place to breath not to differentiate themselves from the middle class.
Similarly electronics music followers create their own music rather than mimicking
the lower class. On the other hand, countersignaling does not look to create
new attitudes; it is about the higher classes differentiating from the middle
classes by imitating the lower class. Countersignaling does not create new signals.

New styles and paradigm shift

Kuhns paradigm shift theory

Kuhn divides the evolution of science into two stages, normal
and extraordinary science. Normal science is the stage in which no new radical
concepts are introduced; scientists try to expand the understanding of the world
within a paradigm. Eventually they find contradictory evidence in this paradigm
and the paradigm enters a crisis stage. Sometimes to solve this crisis, some
concepts of the current paradigm have to change. This is called extraordinary
science or paradigm shift (Perez 1999).

In Perezs words, the main characteristic of an extraordinary
stage of science is the incommensurability, the inability to find an algorithmic
point-to-point translation between both paradigms. For example, the concept
of time is different in Newtons paradigm than in Einsteins paradigm,
and thus a question like How long does this object take to move from A
to B? cannot be translated.

Perez argues that this impossibility of complete translation assures
that some people do not believe that the new paradigm provides valid explanations.
These scientists are not wrong or being irrationals; they just cannot find an
evident reason to validate the truth of the new paradigm. Indeed, sometimes
the skeptics are right and the crisis is solved within the old paradigm, thus
no extraordinary stage occurs. This makes science a subjective task but does
not imply that is irrational.

Kuhns theory says that during extraordinary stages, each
scientist explores a path that she considers more plausible to solve the current
crises, without any external or oversight structure to control the process.
Since any scientist can find an irrefutable proof that his path is correct,
or prove that the others are wrong. This search process helps to explore all
the plausible solutions. One outcome of these searches is that sometimes two
groups of scientists cannot reach an agreement of the right path to follow.
When this happens, the field of study divides and new fields of study emerge.

As scientific evolution can be divided into normal and extraordinary
science, so fashion and style changes should be seen as separate phenomena.

Thus, fashion changes are analogous to normal science; there is
no depth change in the style. The change of the signal comes from insiders as
distinguish from newcomers or impostors.

New styles are like extraordinary science periods where the whole
meaning of being in or out changes in such a way that
the mainstream could not follow the new style without abandoning some important
part of its old style. These changes come from outsiders who are not willing
to belong to the mainstream. This forces the alternative style to reject an
important characteristic of the mainstream, which they cannot follow.

The main similarity between changes in style and changes in science
is the concept of incommensurability. Just as it is impossible to make science
applying two paradigms at the same time, so it is impossible to be part of two
styles at the same time. Style incommensurability assures that the mainstream
cannot assimilate a new style, and thus the new style is a reliable signal of
non-mainstream identity.

As in science, the emergence of new styles are not decided by
a select group, which plans what the next style is going to be. In a given time,
there are multiple people proposing new styles, and most of them never get enough
people to become noticed by others. Thus, these are failed styles that never
get popularized. Because there are multiple styles trying to emerge and there
is not a central command that dictates which style should be adapted, it is
possible that in a given time, two alternative styles may emerge. This phenomenon
is true in current days where we are seeing multitude alternative styles popping
up from multiple sources and with different stylistic proposals.
One difference between these two phenomena is who drives the revolution. The
scientific changes are started by the community looking for better explanations,
it is made by insiders. The style changes are driven by outsiders.

The cycle of becoming mainstream

If a new style reflects the concern and interests of a new generation,
more and more members of the society will adapt it. When the adapters of the
style reach some critical point, the style is brought to the attention of the
general public. In this way, the style is not an alternative signal anymore;
now is part of the mainstream culture.

Becoming a mainstream style creates an identity problem for the
pioneers of the style. At the beginning, the non-mainstreamers create a new
style as a reaction to the mainstream, and proudly see their style evolve and
become more rich and complex. The new style is very effective in communicating
a new set of values against the mainstream. This gets the attention of many
early adaptors who understand the values and the attitudes of the new style.
The early adaptors learn the secret code that allows them to understand and
follow the fashion changes proposed by the pioneers. As time passes, more and
more people adapt the new style, but unfortunately not all of them fully understand
its underlying principles but nevertheless follow the external changes in the
fashion. Thus, the new style has become mainstreamed. The pioneers get frustrated
because their style does not serve as a differentiation signal anymore.

At this point new pioneers start trying to create new styles to
differentiate from the current mainstream culture. The old pioneers values
are now a target of critics. Eventually a new style will start to gain momentum
and the cycle will repeat again.

Since there are multiple alternative styles emerging all the time,
this process is inevitable. Eventually some new style will emerge with an attitude
and values that identifies many people. This style will get the critical mass
necessary to become mainstreamed  sometimes to the detriment of the early
style followers.

Discussion and Conclusions

There are some questions that still need to be answered. What
are the forces that make people reject traditional style and start looking for
alternative forms of expression? It is true that once a particular style is
adapted and becomes part of the mainstream does not serve as a signal for alternative
identity, but this does not imply that it is time to start looking for new forms
of expression. The Baroque period got established in the century XVI and ended
in the XVIII  with 200 year as a mainstream style. In the dawn of the
21st century, this attitude still applies to for some styles and not to others.
Country music emerged in the 1930s and has been mainstreamed since then;
in the rock-electronic scene, new styles emerge every day.

In this paper, we propose that changes in fashion and changes
in style are different phenomenon. They are similar to the normal science and
extraordinary science stages proposed by Kuhn. While changes in fashion differentiate
outsiders from insiders, changes in style are driven by outsiders who refuse
to be integrated into the mainstream culture. Changes in style are incommensurable
in the sense that new styles self-select a different sets of values that are
unacceptable to the mainstream style.

Bibliography

Bergstrom, Carl (2002), An Introduction to the Theory of Honest Signalling.
http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/